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Ad Campaign Confronts Parents About Pot's Effects on Grades
If teens aren't listening, maybe their parents will.
Joey Lomicky | Kansas City infoZine | 10/08/2005

Washington, D.C. - Scripps Howard Foundation Wire - infoZine - As another round of Standardized Achievement Tests approaches this fall, the Office of National Drug Control Policy released a report Tuesday and will launch a national ad campaign to inform parents that marijuana use can threaten teens' academic success.

Packaged as an "open letter to parents," the ad explains that marijuana use is linked to learning troubles, poor grades, amotivational syndrome - an unwillingness to work for rewards - and an increased likelihood of dropping out of school.

The letter is signed by 14 organizations, including the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Council on Education, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America and the Educational Testing Service, the company that administers the SAT.

In ONDCP's report, which included studies such as the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, found that marijuana is the most-commonly used drug among 16- and 17-year-olds. The data also showed 1.3 million teens ages 12 to 17 used marijuana for the first time in 2004 - the same number they expect will take the SATs this fall.

"Kids who use marijuana - more than once - do have more trouble retaining and recalling information," said Larry Fields, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. "It leads to poor academic performance, and recent studies have really pointed that out."

Data in the report, from as far back as 1994, were compiled from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University; studies by Dr. Harrison Pope Jr. of Harvard Medical School; the Oregon Research Institute, which does research on child rearing; the Partnership for a Drug Free America Attitude Tracking Study; and the Youth Marijuana Prevention Initiative, among others.

From a 2000 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse report, ONDCP found that a teen with a "D" average is four times more likely to have used marijuana than a teen with an "A" average.

According to Mitch Earleywine, associate professor of psychology at the University at Albany and the author of "Understanding Marijuana," most high school students who use marijuana had bad grades years before they became users.

"I love the idea of more parental involvement, but we also don't want to lose credibility with teens because we don't tell them the truth," he said.

Some questioned the study, as the research focused on correlations between bad grades and marijuana use rather than showing a cause-and-effect relationship.

Bruce Mirken, communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project, which supports making marijuana legal and regulating it, said the correlations are misleading and do not get to the root of the problem.

"I think this campaign is a waste and counterproductive," Mirken said. "If you treat marijuana use among young people as the problem for poor academic performance, you're diverting the focus from the underlying problem that's causing them to use drugs."

Problems at home or at school often lead teenagers to rely on marijuana to cope with those problems, said Mary Lynn Mathre, a registered nurse who's spent more than 20 years working with drug addiction at the Pantops Clinic, a methadone clinic in Charlottesville, Va., where she is executive director.

"Some kids are self-diagnosing their problems, and in some cases it's actually helped them," she said.

Mathre said she's seen teens use the drug to cope with depression and attention deficit disorder and to focus at school and at home. Others use it to relax, she said.

The ONDCP agreed that marijuana isn't the only reason teens get bad grades, but said all possible reasons should be considered.

"I don't think you can rule out any cause," said Jennifer deVallence, ONDCP spokeswoman. "The bottom line is that drug use is dangerous, harmful and unacceptable. Our goal is to protect and prevent teens from using in the first place before they follow down the path of self-destruction."

Eighth, 10th and 12th grade students showed a significant decrease in overall drug use since 2001, according to the Monitoring the Future study conducted in 2004 by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research and funded by the National Institute for Drug Abuse. The only significant increase was use of inhalants among eighth graders.

Earleywine, Mathre and Mirken agued that the dangers of marijuana are far less than what they've been made out to be and that other drugs such as inhalants, pharmaceutical drugs and methamphetamine should be the focus of anti-drug programs.

In the Monitoring the Future study, alcohol was the most popular substance used by eighth, 10th and 12th graders, cigarettes were second and marijuana was third.

"Let's not exaggerate the dangers or the harm of marijuana," Mirken said. "There are far worse drugs out there that teens are being introduced to."

Earleywine and Mirken said they feared teens would not believe future warnings about drugs if they decide warnings against marijuana were exaggerated.

"Do they start disbelieving other warnings about really lethal drugs?" Mirken asked. "I think you have to put things in a reasonable perspective in order to get a message across."

While the ad campaign set to kick off next week in national newspapers and magazines, Mathre is convinced it's the wrong approach.

"It's been labeled the forbidden drug," she said. That's an enticement for teens to experiment with it."

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